Hope in the Fractures: Mary Oliver’s Ecopoetics of Attention

The American poet Mary Oliver (1935–2019) has been long acknowledged as dedicating her oeuvre to celebrating the beauty of the natural world. Importantly, however, her ecopoetry is also devoted to the themes of death and grief. While not specifically engaged with the climate crisis, her work’s dedication to the role of hope and attention and the task of staying with what is fractured in the human–nonhuman relation, lends itself to ecological concerns. Recent scholarship has explored Oliver’s ecopoetry as interlacing the field of care with that of ecological thinking, and studies in affect with that of environmental humanities. Taking an ecopsychoanalytic approach, my essay explores five of Oliver’s ecopoems – ‘Invitation’ (2008), ‘When Death Comes’ (1992), ‘In Blackwater Woods’ (1983), ‘Wild Geese’ (1986), and ‘Spring Azures’ (1992). By creating a dialogue between Sara Ahmed’s ‘Affective Economies’ (2004) and Sally Weintrobe’s work on ‘split internal landscapes’ (2013) and, in turn, engaging these two theoretical approaches with selections from Oliver’s work, her poems can be read as drawing humans into the wild possibilities of paying attention to the nonhuman world and doing so at levels both psychical, socio-political and ecological.